Musical experience modulates categorical perception of lexical tones in native Chinese speakers.

Han Wu,Hua Shu,Youyi Liu,Yang Zhang,Linjun Zhang,Xiaohui Ma

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00436

Abstract

Although musical training has been shown to facilitate both native and non-native phonetic perception, it remains unclear whether and how musical experience affects native speakers’ categorical perception (CP) of speech at the suprasegmental level. Using both identification and discrimination tasks, this study compared Chinese-speaking musicians and non-musicians in their CP of a lexical tone continuum (from the high level tone, Tone1 to the high falling tone, Tone4). While the identification functions showed similar steepness and boundary location between the two subject groups, the discrimination results revealed superior performance in the musicians for discriminating within-category stimuli pairs but not for between-category stimuli. These findings suggest that musical training can enhance sensitivity to subtle pitch differences between within-category sounds in the presence of robust mental representations in service of CP of lexical tonal contrasts.

Highlights

Categorical perception (CP), which refers to the phenomenon that gradually morphed sounds in a stimulus continuum tend to be perceived as discrete representations, has been studied for more than 50 years
Categorical perception of the speech and non-speech continua was examined in discrimination and identification tasks
While previous work has shown that musical expertise enhances the ability to categorize linguistically relevant sounds of a second language (Wong and Perrachione, 2007; Sadakata and Sekiyama, 2011; Mok and Zuo, 2012), and to discriminate some important acoustic cues of both speech and non-speech sounds (Magne et al, 2006; Marques et al, 2007; Marie et al, 2012; Kühnis et al, 2013), the current results link and extend these results by demonstrating similarities as well as differences in how Chinese musicians and non-musicians perform in the categorical perception (CP) of native tonal contrasts

Summary

Introduction

Categorical perception (CP), which refers to the phenomenon that gradually morphed sounds in a stimulus continuum tend to be perceived as discrete representations, has been studied for more than 50 years. In Mandarin Chinese there are four lexical tones, only one of which is a level tone (Howie, 1976). Native perception of any Mandarin Chinese tonal continuum, due to the necessary involvement of contour tones, tends to be categorical with better sensitivity to between-category distinction relative to within-category differences. Much research interest has been oriented toward understanding the relationship between musical training and speech perception because music and speech share many acoustic commonalities as well as cognitive mechanisms. Both signals convey information by means of timing, pitch, and timbre cues. Two types of pitch information, i.e., contour

Methods

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Conclusion